If attention be not fixed on the little new-discovered island, "Ensamheten," the Kara Sea is open to the north-east. It is bounded on the west by Novaya Zemlya and Vaygats Island; on the east by the Taimur peninsula, the land between the Pjaesina and the Yenisej and Yalmal; and on the south by the northernmost portion of European Russia, Beli Ostrov, and the large estuaries of the Obi and the Yenisej. The coast between Cape Chelyuskin and the Yenisej consists of low rocky heights, formed of crystalline schists, gneiss, and eruptive rocks, from the Yenisej to beyond the most southerly part of the Kara Sea, of the Gyda and Yalmal _tundras_ beds of sand of equal fineness, and at Vaygats Island and the southern part of Novaya Zemlya (to 73 deg. N.L.) of limestone and beds of schist[88] which slope towards the sea with a steep escarpment three to fifteen metres high, but form, besides, the substratum of a level plain, full of small collections of water which is quite free of snow in summer. North of 73 deg. again the west coast of the Kara Sea is occupied by mountains, which near Matotschkin are very high, and distributed in a confused mass of isolated peaks, but farther north become lower and take the form of a plateau. Where the mountains begin, some few or only very inconsiderable collections of ice are to be seen, and the very mountain tops are in summer free of snow. Farther north glaciers commence, which increase towards the north in number and size, till they finally form a continuous inland-ice which, like those of Greenland and Spitzbergen, with its enormous ice-sheet, levels mountains and valleys, and converts the interior of the land into a wilderness of ice, and forms one of the fields for the formation of icebergs or glacier-iceblocks, which play so great a _role_ in sketches of voyages in the Polar seas. I have not myself visited the inland-ice on the northern part of Novaya Zemlya, but doubtless the experience I have previously gained during an excursion with Dr. Berggren on the inland-ice of Greenland in the month of July 1870, _after all the snow on it had melted_, and with Captain Palander on the inland-ice of North-East Land in the beginning of June 1873, _before any melting of snow had commenced_, is also applicable to the ice-wilderness of north Novaya Zemlya. [Illustration: SECTION OF INLAND-ICE. A. Open glacier-canal. B. Snow-filled canal. C. Canal concealed by a snow-vault. D. Glacier-clefts. ]